Thousands of blogs, websites and pages are born each day, but keeping them alive takes blogging passion. Here’s a summary of the downside of blogging, whether for yourself or for your organization.

Back in the heyday of blogging, Technorati was estimating that 175,000 new blogs were born each day, or one every half-second.

Maybe only one-tenth of them made it past five posts. And perhaps many of those same keystrokes got pumped into other social networking platforms like Facebook and Tumblr. That leaves a lot of people and companies still maintaining their blogs. And it leaves a lot of us still reading them.

“What’s wrong with blogging?” ProBlogger asks

But even back in those days, blogger Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net asked us, “What’s wrong with blogging?” Darren has a huge following and his question netted almost 150 comments, covering a gamut of complaints about blogging in general. A digest of some of what’s wrong with blogging:

• English is the dominant language in blogging (so far), and other cultures/languages are missing out on valuable content.
• Journalists deride blogging.
• Journalists thrive on blogging.
• Blogging has become a form of advertising.
• Many bloggers are reluctant to link to another blog in the same niche.
• It’s hard to generate valuable content regularly that will get a blog noticed.
• Generally, the quality of writing is low on blogs.
• Too many posts are merely about content on other blogs (like this one, for that matter).
• Only bloggers read blogs.
• The get-rich-quick crowd and affiliate marketing are polluting blogging.
• Upstart bloggers are displacing experts in their field.
• Desire for popularity trumps quality in content.

It’s a cautionary tale for content marketing writers working on corporate (and personal) blogs. It is tough work. It probably won’t pay off in the short run. You may not experience instant gratification or a huge following. So why do it?

To tell your story. Passionately.

Summon your blogging passion

Your organization is a going concern, which means that things are constantly changing in it. There’s a story in those changing things, and your followers, customers, vendors, friends, investors and journalists want to know it.

If it’s a good-enough story, it’s easy to be passionate about telling it.

Those press releases you publish a couple of times a month? Not much passion in those, is there?

Use your blog to tell people the why behind the news, in a way that shows what your organization is passionate about: child literacy, climate change, military hegemony, helping poor people get what they need. Readers won’t magically flock to your blog, but when they take a close look at you, they’ll see passion, and that’s where followers come from.

Change your objective from boosting blog readership to telling your organization’s story passionately, and you’ll subtract a lot of the stress from the process. Blogging will still be tough, of course, but it will be much more bearable.

photo credit: Pingnews.com / CC BY-SA 2.0